Yes! I’ve wanted this for years! Too bad it won’t be out for at least another year 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/168028/google_announces_chrome_os.html
It was only a matter of time.
Microsoft will stomp them, just as they did with Netscape. Google will fail anyway because of all the support required for every little piece of hardware and all the LOB applications that Windows has.
“Alas, poor Microsoft.”
My hankie is pretty dry for them. The Chrome browser commands only 5% of the market share, even though it’s prominently promoted all over the damned place, not least of which through Google’s otherwise ascetic front page.
I really wanted to like Chrome - it sounds a chuffing idea. Unfortunately, it’s not a very good browser, unless your browsing is limited to simple text webpages. An OS that is intended “for people who spend most of their time on the web,” and then that experience is mediated through Chrome?
Not much of a threat. Most people are going to want to be able to have more (ie; some) flexibility with software and hardware. Google Docs is great for free, convenient use in a pinch, but most people need a little more than a cloud-based solution.
This sounds like it may find its way onto some people’s ultraportables, but be impractical everywhere else. This doesn’t really displace MS at all, it’s mainly going to cut into the use of Ubuntu and other linux distros, in those limited instances where they’re installed on a machine that is used just for web-browsing.
Great, for that application - but it’s silly to colour this as a threat to Microsoft.
My theory is - That’s why Google’s gunning for the netbook market. The available hardware configurations are probably much lower than the plethora of options available to desktop PCs. With enough planning and a decent update rollout system, the Google Chrome OS could be a serious contender with drivers that “just work”, something Linux distributions have been trying to do for years.
Of course, this probably just means Microsoft and ASUS would just ramp up their “Its Better with Windows” campaign again.
I bet the search function in this OS will work really, really well. 
I beg to differ. I use Chrome as my main browser and it’s just fine.
Yeah, but AdBlock will totally suck.
If it can’t run my editor, forget it. AFAIK, only Windows can.
Ditto.
Did it get better? I tried it out at launch and found that it rendered quite a few sites in odd ways, and more importantly, it crashed a lot. It didn’t take me very long to swing back to Opera.
I use it almost exclusively. It’s great for anything that doesn’t use ActiveX controls and the like. It rarely crashes, renders web pages just fine, and PDFs and Flash very quickly, and boots in seconds. In fact it boots so quickly that when returning to my former browser of choice I was tempted to start a thread called “since when did Firefox become bloatware?”
My last two jobs used Google Documents exclusively. There are a lot of nonprofits that are using Google’s stuff to collaborate. I wouldn’t sweep their stuff under the rug yet.
I dunno, have you used Google Desktop? I’m sure it works like a champ, but it’s heavy as a box of rocks. Granted, the new Windows search thing (I forget what it is, but I think it’s part of Office) is also heavy, but it works better than normal search too.
Web searching is ok for Google, because they index everything on their own servers and query their own servers. But when the “server” is your machine, no matter how smart the algorithms are the process is still going to be heavy and a huge burden.
Since they’re building the thing on top of Linux, they’ve already got most of the low-level drivers sorted. Besides, they’re going to deal with netbook manufacturers directly so you won’t have to sort out stuff with drivers - they’ll just get the manufacturers to build stuff that will work.
Emacs works everywhere. But I guess they’re planning on doing as much as possible using google docs (and Gears - which IMO is the most important part of the plan - you’ll get a pre-build system that will run Gears apps online & offline, and you can also run them on all the major desktop OSs and lots of phones - THAT is what microsoft is going to be scared about).
I really wish it well, but I dont see it beating Windows any day soon.
An OS is an OS to me only when it can run the latest version of Civilization.
5% market share for Chrome? More like 1%.
Google has tremendous brand power, but is still essentially a one hit wonder. It’s spent untold billions on R&D from which it has seen little or no return. I don’t underestimate the sheer amount of cash they can burn on projects like this, but I am very skeptical.
Actually, they’re making inroads since the last time I looked in. (Up to 6%, now.)
I may give it another shot.
Keep in mind that the w3schools statistics are skewed towards the type of people that visit the website in general. You’d expect a lower percentage of IE users visiting a website on web coding (and other such things).
Same here. I am Bi-OS (I have an Imac and a Dell laptop) I run Chrome almost exclusively on the laptop. I occasionally have to use IE or, more commonly, Firefox for some sites and I wish I didn’t have to. I wish Google hurried up and made it available for Macs already, I need to use two different browsers sometimes and I like Chrome much better than Safari.